


maybe i'll feel better

by strikereurekapitcrew



Series: repetition [2]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Julia Burnsides Lives, Multi, Nightmares, depictions of violence, dwelf julia bursides, eighth bird julia burnsides, poor family life making for poor mental health
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-26
Updated: 2018-06-26
Packaged: 2019-05-28 18:36:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15055271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikereurekapitcrew/pseuds/strikereurekapitcrew
Summary: Julia thinks that splitting the Light isn't a good idea. She's not so sure about Lucretia's plan either.





	maybe i'll feel better

**Author's Note:**

  * For [epersonae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/epersonae/gifts).



> title taken from therapy by khalid, because that was what i was listening to while i wrote

This is a terrible plan.

Jules hasn’t ever handled family meetings like this very well, mostly because her family was huge and there were just too many raised voices, too much tension. This is reminiscent of that, reminiscent of the family that she left behind, devoured by a living hunger.

Lup and Barry want to split the Light. Lucretia wants to cast a shield around wherever it is that they land. The others side with the Liches, and Julia is torn in the middle.

“I don’t agree with any of this.”

Seven pairs of eyes turn to the dwelvish woman as soon as the words leave her lips, and the silence is as heavy is it is the day that she turned eighteen for the first time and told her parents that she was leaving with the IPRE to be an explorer.

“ _ A little bit of danger? _ We’ve seen the good that the Light can do, in the Animal Kingdom. They were laying down the foundations for civilizations as  _ we _ know them. Animals, sharing a common language, sharing a culture, creating architecture!” she says. “All of that good. Now think about what the Light, even a small part of it, could do in the hands of someone,  _ anyone _ , that didn’t want to use the Inspiration for good things. Who could be corrupted. I don’t think the risk of severing every Bond on a planar system is a good idea, but there has to be another way. There’s alw-”

Davenport interrupts with a resigned “It sounds like we have a pretty solid majority here,” and Julia bites her tongue, cutting off anything that she had to say. It won’t matter, the words that would leave her lips, so she bites her tongue, pushes her chair back, and stands from the table.

As she leaves the room, she hears Lup swear on both of her lives that if splitting the Light doesn’t work, that they’ll try Luce’s plan.

She’s down the corridor before Lucretia answers. The slam of her door against the wall of her quarters is satisfying, and the slam of it closed adds to that feeling.

_ Slamming doors? Really, Juliette?  _ The echoes of her mother’s voice in her head make the dwelf set her jaw, fists clenching because the memories of her father’s voice follow it.

_ You’re better than this,  _ he tells her, and she can practically see him standing there, a vision in the light that’s coming through the port.  _ You need to block out this mess, find some way to channel it- _

Her left hand swings out, striking a jar of paint water she hasn’t dumped yet. The glass flies from the corner of her desk, through the the apparition of her dignified, disapproving father, dispelling the memories and shattering with a loud clatter against the wall.

They promised.

They  _ swore _ that they weren’t going to let themselves make decisions like this for worlds, and yet, here they are.

Her eyes sting with hot tears, and she picks up something heavy from her desk -duck that Magnus carved her, she thinks, since she can’t see it through her tears blinding her- and hefts that at the opposite wall.

The others set to work in the following years, but Julia?

Julia does not.

She’s always been a metalworker, a craftswoman, but she can’t bring herself to do this. She can’t bring herself to craft an object to hold a fragment of the Light of Creation, however small, knowing just how powerful the Thrall is when it’s whole. She can’t bring herself to take part in a decision that will, ultimately, send the fate of whatever world they manage to do this on right into the shitter.

She dies just a couple weeks after the decision is made. It’s slow, painful, dragged out over the course of four days. She thinks, anyway. The fever makes her delusional, and her clearest memory of it is Lup’s face hovering over hers, Magnus’ fingers curled in hers, and Lucretia hovering in the door, wasting away in a cloud of guilt.

Her last thought in that cycle is that it’s freeing, hearing Lup -her second love, if she’s honest- tell her that it’s okay to rest.

The Bond Engine spits her back out and Lup’s are the first lips on hers, her near hysterical laughs at Magnus’ indignant squawk wiped away at the fierceness with which the human kisses her. Luce is last, hovering on the outside of the reunion as if she doesn’t belong, always the wallflower. Julia lingers with her the longest, no words or kisses exchanged, both petite women standing on the deck with fingers curled in each other’s hair, foreheads pressed together as if it’s the first time and the last all wrapped into one.

They run from the Hunger.

They continue working, designing their Relics.

Julia doesn’t.

Where art and creation had been something of a refuge for her the last century, it’s the last thing she wants to do these days. Everyone else is working away, talking about the magic associated with their items, what they plan to do, and she can’t handle it.

 

Years after, she still thinks it’s a terrible plan. 

To hear the others tell it, there’s Barry and Lup’s plan, and Lucretia’s plan, and there’s nothing else. No other options, no matter how she tried to beg them that they had to find another way. She does her best to keep her emotions off her face, and is pleased that nobody in the crew is able to look into her mind. If they were, the screams they would hear on constant loop would be cause for concern that she doesn’t necessarily have the words to assuage.

Magnus isn’t oblivious, but knows that she’ll come to him in her own time. Lucretia knows exactly how she feels without there needing to be a conversation, not that Julia thinks they’re going to have one any time soon. The air has been frigid between her and her wife since the discussion of the plan, since Julia told them that she wasn’t going to play God, but she wasn’t going to side with Lucretia either. Whenever she thinks about apologizing, about broaching the subject, she remembers the betrayal that burned in Lucretia’s silvery eyes, the anger that roiled in a way that the others might not have seen, but that Julia knew like her own glass-breaking, hair-trigger temper.

 

The others keep drafting, and Julia, to her credit, tries. Maybe it won’t be so bad, something in her says and sounds akin to some sort of… ooze amalgamation of her parents. As stressed out as drawing has made her recently, she starts to draw. 

The only thing she draws is a diadem.

It ranges in looks, from a simple circlet to an intricate headdress befitting the Raven Queen.

Nothing feels right to her, so the drawings pile up, useless tchochkes that are just increasingly more and more wrong than the last.

_ Keep drawing, _ the abomination voice in her head screams.  _ You’ll find it in there somewhere. _

 

As the days progress, Julia wants to take the creations as soon as they’re finished and disappear with them until the Hunger’s scouts find them, until the end of the cycle, until she’s spat back out by the Bond Engine and is left to face her family in her treachery.

Until they try again.

_ Until they try again. _

Her plans are swept from her desk in a fix of anxiety, her hands curling in her hair just behind her ears. She panics, of course, with her teeth literally digging into her knees to keep the little animal sounds leaving her throat from alerting her crewmates, or her lovers.

It really sinks in that this will be the end of it.

It really sinks in how long they’ve been going.

At the start of the century, they were all kids, save for Barry, Davenport, and Merle, and they’re still kids now, but so much older than they should be. Desperation, she knows, has twisted their hearts, like abjuration magic turning into rampant fanaticism. It has been a century, and they are tired. Tired of fear, and of loss, and of running.

_ They are so gods damned tired of running. _

The panic drives her into a state she can’t come down from, and she’s not sure just when she fell asleep, but Julia dreams.

 

She dreams of death, and of fire, of a drowned city, and of ash raining down on her blonde curls, lank with sweat and blood that she’s not sure belongs to her or another.

She sees a man, much larger than her and larger still than Magnus, eyes glinting an unnatural gold for a human. There’s madness there, and a simple looking circlet rests atop his head. He looks straight at her as if this battlefield is real, as if he sees her, and she feels the creeping feeling of Dominate Person creeping into her bones.

Only she can’t fight this like she can when she’s awake.

Only she’s not charmed, per se. She’s conscious, and she’s terrified, like she’s riding passenger to someone piloting her own body.

_"You thought that your petty revolution would stand? Would accomplish_ anything _?"_  


Her heavy maul leaves her hand, leaving a sizeable dent in the earth at her side as she’s forced to turn. Her chest feels tight, and this feels  _ real _ .

She sees Magnus, longsword in hand. Covered in blood.

His eyes are hollow, as if he’s not in his body. Where there is usually instant joy in varying volume at the sight of her, there is nothing, and she hears a sob leave her lips, a weak, dwarvish plea for him.

_ I have to wake up. This is just a dream, I have to wake up _ , she thinks, even as she takes an unwilling step toward the man she loves.

In her periphery she sees Lucretia, her long white curls stained with blood, slumped over on the ground with a wound in her chest, which is still.

The sword pierces her armor, through her stomach and out her spine. Blood bubbles at her lips as she tries to wrest back control of her body, and she can hear the man’s maniacal cackles as clearly as she saw the madness in his tainted eyes.

Magnus looks through her, and there is nothing. He plants his boot on her pelvis and shoves her to the ground, removing the sword.

She wakes with a jolt, drenched in sweat. Her hands find her stomach in the dark, and there’s nothing there, but the feeling of being stabbed in the stomach lingers. Julia feels like she’s going to vomit. The clock reads pretty close to the time she started panicking, simply the other hemisphere of the day, and she almost wishes that she didn’t have dark vision so that she couldn’t see her room in perfect clarity enough that she could read the clock.

She untangles herself from the sweat-soaked sheets, which she absently rips from the bed and discards in a hamper before padding down the passage in search of her husband.

 

(They aren’t even married yet in this plane, and it’s actually Lucretia’s turn to renew their vows, but the comfort of thinking about the human man as her husband supersedes everything, even sitting between the twins in a pile of purring elves.)

 

It almost seems like he’s expecting her, or even coming to find her in her quarters, as Magnus opens the door as she’s raising her fist to knock.

Magnus blinks in shock, but it melts away to that perfectly endeared smile he always has for her, from the moment she slammed his arm down in the quad at the IPRE. “Hey,” he breathes out in the dark, and his body languages asks  _ Are you okay? _

“Hi,” she replies softly, shyly, and the way she hugs herself in the darkness of the corridor whispers back,  _ I don’t think so  _ in the same breath.

He hums, a soft little  _ huh _ with no interrogative whatsoever, and steps aside to let her into his space. There's a half-finished duck on his desk, and were it not for needing the comfort of her arms around herself, she might have picked it up and cradled it in callused hands.

“Rough night?” he asks. When she doesn’t answer, he tries again. “Missing home?”

That hits her hard somewhere between her ribs and stomach, and she laughs, biting down on the edge of hysteria before she can dissolve into a mess on his bedroom floor. “You know that you’re my home, Magnus Burnsides.”

It’s something she’s been saying for nearly forty years now, usually with her forehead pressed to his, her fingers tangled in his hair, her lips close enough to taste the cider on his. It’s true, too. The moment she walked out of her parents’ door, she lost everything, and regained it the moment she walked onto the deck of the Starblaster. 

She regains it at the start of every year, reaching up to run her fingers over the split in his lip and the black eye that adorn the face of the man she loves.

He grins at her, looking as young as he ever has and as old as he’s ever been, and the gravity of their time together hits her again. Julia drops to sit on the edge of his bed, pulling her knees up to her chest. The quiet despair must show in her face and not just her body language, because he leans close to press a kiss to her forehead, lingering with his lips still against her clammy skin.

“When we get- When they split the Light, I need you to take my piece.”

It breaks the silence, and she immediately misses him when he pulls away to look at her. She doesn’t have to look up at him to know that he’s staring at her in incredulity.

“Jules, I know you’re upset about the way the decision went, but that doesn’t mean-”

“I’m not angry. I had a nightmare-” Julia starts.

“It was just a nightmare-” Magnus talks over her.

“ _ Magnus _ ,” she says, and the ragged, desperate edge of it makes him stop. Her green eyes are clamped shut, and she can’t look at him, even as he lifts her face. 

“Julia.” She’s quiet, eyes shut tight.

“Jules, honey, look at me.”

And she does. His eyes are dark and rich, like the first drops of coffee pouring into her white ceramic mug after a long night of maintenance work on the ship. His large hands cradle her face, smoothing over what little beard she has. The weight of her marriage beads shifts at the action, as if reminding her of her bonds to him, to Lucretia. The intensity in his gaze breaks something in her and she folds herself forward, pressing her forehead to his collarbone and just breathing him in.

“I had a nightmare about the relic I’ve been drawing, and it was used on me. On  _ You. _ You looked at me like I wasn’t there, like you weren’t there and-”

And the bite of steel cutting through her core like she was made of butter comes back in an uncomfortable way that reminds her that the nightmare was far too real for it to just be a dream, and  _ that _ is what scares her.

“I can’t let that happen. Enchantment is my wheelhouse, I can’t unleash something like that into the world. I won’t play God, I can’t.”

Julia doesn’t say any more. Magnus doesn’t need her to. For a long moment, they sit, perched on the edge of his bed and listening to the sounds of the hull settling, of each other’s breathing. Somewhere in the distance, she almost swears that she can hear Fisher singing in the night, as the morning begins to kiss it hello at the horizon.

“Are you going to tell the others?”

She considers, for a moment, crafting a lie, but shakes her head where it’s still pressed to his chest. “Not yet. I will when we have the Light. Or maybe when the Relics are finished. I don’t know that I need to.”

“You were pretty clear about not being into the idea,” he muses aloud, dropping his chin just enough to rest it atop her head. His sideburns catch her curls, tugging a smile out of her.

“Yeah,” she breathes, and lets the quiet settle again.

 

When they enter the next plane, they’re struck by how familiar it all is. It… It seems a lot like their home, though the sky is blue and there’s only one sun. Merle finds he knows people, and given her heritage, she almost wonders if she does too, but Julia chooses not to search. She’s not ready, not yet. It makes her sick to her stomach, anxiety writhing in her wrought-iron gut like tendrils of the Hunger trying to eat her from inside out.

When the Light of Creation falls a day later, they’re ready, but  _ ready _ is entirely subjective, its definition depending entirely on which member of the Starblaster crew that you asked.

Now that they’re on the precipice of doing this, Julia is absolutely certain that this is the wrong way to do things, but they are here, and they’re moving.

She wants to start screaming again as Barry and Lup separate the Light, and the moment that Bluejeans passes it into her hands, Julia wants to vomit all over the other scientist’s boots. Even in smaller, supposedly more manageable pieces, the Thrall is so much; the Light pleads to be used. Before they’re even finished, she passes her portion right into Magnus’ hands, watching the shock on the others and the resignation in him as their pieces of the Light become one.

Julia kisses him goodbye when he takes the Chalice to hide, and begs for him to come home, securing the red cloak over his shoulders.

 

The others finish their works. A stone, a gauntlet, a monocle, a bell, a staff, a sash. All seemingly innocuous, all deceptive. She watches as they disappear, one by one, into the world, because the Light pleads to be used, and because keeping these objects will do nothing to protect them from the Hunger.

She watches as the world simmers, then boils over, and gods, what have they done?

_ What have we done? _

 

After the first city is destroyed by Lup’s creation, Julia gathers her sketches of the diadem she refused to make, the diadem she dreamed would bring destruction to Toril, and she cries as she burns them, disgusted at herself for being grateful - _relieved-_ that nobody could touch it, angrier and angrier with herself with each tragedy that comes of the Relic Wars.

_ Is a little bit of danger out in the world… isn’t that better? Than the whole world being destroyed? _

 

**Author's Note:**

> if you made it this far, hey thanks.


End file.
